Experience after the third anniversary of GTD

It has been more than three years since we started practicing GTD in July 2011. According to the objectives set at the beginning of the year, we should write a bit about GTD, however, when I mentioned the pen, I found that there was not much new experience. Most of my experiences have been written in previous articles, and even some procedures have been simplified, it seems that this article is to repeat the previous articles.

 

1. What is GTD?

GTD is a systematic method of time management. On the one hand, it gives you full control over the affairs in your work and life, relieves anxiety and improves efficiency. On the other hand, it allows you to grasp the perspective, let you focus on meaningful things.

The following figure in "deal with III" illustrates this concept in two dimensions. In the horizontal direction, you use the GTD process to process transactions, so that you can have a depended system, when doing things, you can eliminate distractions, reduce anxiety, and make gtder more efficient in processing transactions. In the vertical direction, you can examine various transactions from six levels. If the horizontal direction enables you to do things efficiently, you can do the right things vertically.

2. What are the main changes in GTD experience over the past three years?

1) when I was just studying GTD for two months, I focused on reading books, searching for network materials, and practicing GTD processes to improve efficiency and reduce anxiety. The article I wrote at that time: my iPhone + Mac + omnifocus practices GTD and ztd experiences.

Since I had just bought an iPhone, omnifocus was quickly selected for the tool. One of the main reasons I chose it was stability and strength. Many people spent too much time selecting the GTD tool, it is recommended that you select within one month of reading the GTD book. Read "deal with I" and "Register of Xiaoqiang", quickly collect, plan, organize, execute, archive reference materials, and review each week. In general, the collection is good, the action planned and organized is not easy to execute, and the review efficiency is not high.

2) When I learned the first anniversary: I still practiced the GTD process, learned to vertically break down the project, and developed the habit of time recording, reading, and exercising. At that time, I had a research task on a business trip to Shanghai. I contacted the Shanghai GTD Speech Club to give a speech titled how to build a GTD with an iPhone for one year. In fact, the software toolkit is not the main one, but the development of several habits, so that you have a continuous cycle of positive energy. Time Records let me know where time goes, so as to reduce the waste of time; reading books let me know the world, promote mental growth, and learn valuable experience accumulated by others throughout my life; exercise keeps me energetic in doing things and living.

3) When I learned the second anniversary: I started to focus on the perspective and sort out my roles, responsibilities, and objectives. At that time, I wrote an article: some experiences after the 2nd anniversary of GTD practices. First, we created an efficient omnifocus system with a more organized transaction classification. To make the office environment more efficient, we created a GTD-style desktop and clarified our responsibilities, use the annual dream chart to motivate you to achieve your annual goal.

4) When I learned the third anniversary, I could not feel the existence of GTD too much. After all, GTD is just a tool and I am not a time management trainer, I just used GTD to sort out my perspective and your actions. In a lot of other time, I still mainly want to execute actions and get things done ), it may also be because of the stable GTD system, which will be a slow polishing process in the future.

 

3. What are the steps in the GTD process?

The above GTD flowchart has various versions, but the main content is not much different.

Collection: We recommend that you do not have too many collection tools. If there are too many collection tools, you should list them one by one in the review checklist and clear them one by one. In this way, at least everything collected can be processed every week.

What is this: it is a clear step. Some transactions may need to be discarded if they do not meet their own goals. Some transactions may gain benefits in other aspects, although they do not meet their long-term goals for the time being, you need to put it in the "Future/Maybe"; some things are obviously unable to schedule the time in the recent period, you can set a start time for it, at that time, we considered whether the project was feasible.

Project decomposition: when multiple steps are required, you need to arrange an action to break down the project when there is time, the process of thinking can be divided by the natural plan model on the 63 pages of "deal with I", and the decomposed content can be incorporated into GTD management.

Delegate to others: After delegate to others, set the action context to "Waiting". You can set another deadline to ask about the progress of the action at that time. This waiting list should also be checked during weekly review.

Calendar: If there is no strict time requirement, you don't need to set the action to the calendar. But if a task is really very important, you can also force yourself to put it into the calendar for forcible execution, but use it with caution. When you want to develop a habit, you can set cycle tasks to remind yourself to stick to them every day.

Context classification: My current context includes focus, Reding, browsing, call/email/QQ, outdoor, home, waiting, future/maybe, which can be adjusted based on your own situation, but it is best not to have more than 10.

Reference: You can also use the classification method. I introduced a classification method in "Experiences after the 2nd anniversary of GTD practices, the folder structure of the computer can correspond to several responsibilities in GTD.

 

4. How do I practice six heights?

It was hard to understand the meaning of these six heights when I first learned about GTD. When I practiced gtd1 for years, I gradually got to know a few things with the familiarity of the process and more than 50 weekly reviews. The author of GTD proposed six heights, which are actually the following four heights of practice.

Level 4: Target-> year

Level 3: Responsibility-> month

Level 2: Project-> week

Level 1: Action-> day

The lowest layer is composed of many actions. To implement the GTD process in daily transactions, You need to skillfully apply the GTD process, collection, sorting, execution, review, and record of all transactions are the basis of GTD. When these tasks are handled well, the efficiency will naturally increase.

The above layer is composed of projects. The projects here are a little different from the projects that are often mentioned in the work. projects can be large or small, as long as multiple steps or actions are required, it can be set as a project. One principle is to make the tasks in the project easy to execute. During the Weekly Review, the implementation of these projects should be checked one by one.

The last layer is the responsibility scope, which refers to the different responsibilities of each person in different roles in society. As a child's father, as a unit administrator, and as a wife's husband, as a parent's child ...... People must bear the corresponding responsibilities. Maybe the difference between people and other animals lies in the need to bear these responsibilities in their lives.

The previous layer corresponds to the goal of 1-3 years. This goal can be set at the beginning of the year, and is continuously decomposed in weekly and monthly reviews and implemented on a weekly and daily basis, some goals do not adapt to the latest changes, so we need to make bold adjustments.

The author mentioned that the height of layer 5th corresponds to the goal of about five years, while that of layer 6th is some principles and principles that must be respected in life. Maybe GTD cannot understand these heights even when it has not been in practice for three years.

 

5. How did one day of the efficient gtder be spent?

In the past, I did not care about the daily routines in GTD. Later I found that a regular daily routine can ensure efficient GTD operation.

My daily schedule at work is: (OR) Get up and prepare for breakfast, while reading or reading current affairs news, from to, memorizing words (or listening to VOA ), work at (), lunch and lunch break at, dinner at, exercise at, read at, accompany family members or housework, and go to bed. During working hours, we usually find out what to do from GTD and start to execute the task. After a period of time (40-60 minutes), we can take a rest and focus on it for a while.

If there is a big change, you need to quickly adjust the daily routine. For example, I attended a intensive training session in 2013 and basically set the daily routine in the first week, after another attempt, the daily routine that feels more efficient is: 6: 00 running or reading, 6: 30 back words, breakfast, English dictation VOA,-class, lunch, views the news, lunch break, class from to, dinner, read the news, review other things in GTD from to, run or read aloud at, or do not charge any mental resources, go to bed.

With the above experience, I feel that for a student (below sophomore year), the main task is learning. It may not be very useful to use GTD, he only needs a simple calendar and task list, but for junior students, if they have courses, papers, and jobs, they may need GTD.

In daily transaction processing, the most common process here is GTD:

1) collect some new things or good ideas to inbox immediately.

2) When there is free time, you can think about and classify tasks in inbox. If a complicated project is involved, you can arrange a period of brainstorming to seriously consider the significance of the project, project decomposition to form multiple actions into the system.

3) when executing a transaction, develop the habit of focusing, turn off QQ and other disturbing programs, write programs, write documents, think about project plans, review and so on.

4) after executing an event, record a small line of time log in Evernote. If you forget it, you can add it later. Below is the structure of my Evernote.

5) I didn't stick to the habit of morning diaries. I think there is a weekly review, which is enough to clear up the transactions.

6) at night, you can study, exercise, and accompany your family.

 

6. Is weekly review important? What to do?

In my opinion, if there is no Weekly Review, it cannot be called GTD. If your transaction is relatively monotonous, you can review it every two weeks. This review is required.

The GTD system requires you to become the system on which you depend. The review process every week is to constantly update the GTD system and find a short period of time to think about and plan it. You trust it, you will not be anxious. If something is not properly arranged, it will constantly emerge in your mind, leading to anxiety.

With the time log in Evernote, a weekly transaction summary can usually be completed within 20-30 minutes. I will summarize the summary into a Word document:

After completing the weekly summary, follow the weekly review checklist (detailed list in the gtd2 anniversary summary). In addition, we strongly recommend this efficient omnifocus classification system, which is clearer and faster.

 

7. How to make a monthly summary?

I made a Word document, which records weekly summary and monthly summary, and has been sticking to it since January 10, 2011. In the monthly summary, the weekly work content is summarized based on the responsibilities in the annual target to see the progress of each target decomposition.

The following is an outline of the monthly summary:

 

8. What should I summarize every year?

Setting a target at the beginning of the year is quite necessary and should be made public so that we can be motivated to accomplish it and will not tear up the contract with ourselves. It is quite tempting to draw a vision at the beginning of the year.

The following is a slightly modified responsibility chart, and some numbers can be used as the annual vision chart.

In the annual summary, you only need to summarize the objectives at the beginning of the year, and then summarize the summary for a few months to write a comprehensive annual summary.

 

9. What are my most important tools?

The following are commonly used:

Omnifocus for iPhone: I still use version 1. I am not willing to buy version 2 for more than 100 yuan. It is said that a Daniel only uses the self-carried task list management on the iPhone to implement GTD.

Omnifocus for Mac: It is generally not used. It is enough to review it on the iPad. IPhone reviews are somewhat inefficient.

Evernote: it uses the International version and is free of charge. With my time record method, there are still a lot of 60 m traffic remaining.

Kingsoft Disk: Collect documents and e-books. The key is cloud synchronization. I like the function of integrating it into windows Resource Manager.

Everything: a powerful tool for searching for files. Of course, you must set a file name.